Skeptiks – why

Similarly, in a court of law, juries are asked to accept a level of proof that is beyond a reasonable doubt — not absolute certainty — when deciding to convict a defendant.

The effects of climate change may drastically alter our environment, and this prospect can be frightening to people. When faced with drastic change, it is not unusual for people to deny bad news in order to cope with the stress. However, denial can be counter-productive by preventing appropriate planning and timely action that might delay or lessen the severity of the changes. Skip to Main Content Area.

The value of living up to our responsibility to protect other species also divides Americans along partisan lines. Americans who report that any of these values are extremely important are more likely to be climate change Believers. In order to explore the relationship between spirituality and perspectives on the environment, the survey include four measures to assess the frequency of personal spiritual experiences.

These four measures were combined using an additive scale into a Spiritual Experiences Index. In general, Protestants report more frequent spiritual experiences than Catholics, Jewish Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

The most notable demographic differences on the Spiritual Experiences Index are by age and gender. There are no significant differences on the Spiritual Experiences Index by party affiliation, race, region, or educational attainment. There is no significant relationship between scores on the Spiritual Experiences Index and views about climate change. Americans who report having spiritual experiences more often generally score higher on the Climate Change Concern Index.

Most Americans who attend religious services at least once or twice a month report hearing little from their clergy leader about the issue of climate change. Non-white Americans who attend services at least once a month report significantly higher levels of clergy engagement with climate change.

Few Americans who attend religious services at least once or twice a month say their place of worship has ever sponsored events or education programs about the issue of climate change. There are only minor differences among other religious affiliation groups.

Americans who belong to a congregation or place of worship that sponsors activities about climate change are more likely to be climate change Believers than those who do not. Members of religious communities whose congregations sponsor programs or discussion sessions on climate change also score higher on the Climate Change Concern Index than those who do not attend such congregations. Hispanic Catholics and Black Protestants are likeliest to believe that God would not allow humans to destroy the planet.

Americans generally reject the idea that God intended humans to use the earth strictly for human benefit. By contrast, black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants are divided on this question. Among Americans who believe the earth is getting warmer, there are slight variances among different demographics. Men who say global temperatures are rising are also somewhat more optimistic than women who hold the same view about the extent to which technology can be harnessed to solve the issue of climate change.

Although Americans overall rank climate change low among a range of other potentially important issues, most prefer to address the issue now rather than postponing action. Notably, the generational differences on this question are modest. There are substantial political divides over whether action to deal with climate change should happen now or later.

Republicans, by contrast, are divided. Political groups disagree about the source of the solution for climate change. Independents closely mirror the general public. Regardless of whether Americans believe the primary solution to climate change will come from the private or public sector, most support stronger government action on the issue.

Support for increased government involvement has remained stable over the past two years. There are stark partisan divisions when it comes to views about government action on climate change.

Americans are broadly supportive of energy policies that place additional limits on carbon dioxides emissions, even if such policies impose new costs. Americans are more divided over policies that would promote increased production from traditional fossil fuels.

Americans are nearly evenly divided in their support for a policy that would impose an additional tax on companies that produce fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas, even if the policy results in higher electricity costs. There are substantial divisions on this question by educational attainment.

The views of Democrats and independents also diverge from those of Republicans and Tea Party members. Americans are primarily divided along political lines on the question of federal funding for renewable energy. Republicans are closely divided. The 7-point linear scale identifies four distinct groupings: highly concerned 2,3 , somewhat concerned 4 , not too concerned 5,6 , and not at all concerned 7,8.

Lower scores on the scale indicate higher concern. Konrath, and Norbert Schwarz. The Spiritual Experiences Index was created as an additive scale from the four questions above and produced a score range of Categories were created as follows: very high score of , high score of , moderate score of , low score of , very low score of Protestants generally report feeling a connection to nature and the earth more often than members of other religious groups.

Jones, Robert P. Email Address. First Name. Last Name. Phone Number. Job Title. If you do not agree to be bound by these terms, do not download or use the Data. It seems to me that any analysis of the word "knowledge" that assigned to it a meaning according to which it would be impossible to know any ordinary empirical proposition would be highly suspect, to say the least. I think it should rather be viewed as a reductio ad absurdum of the analysis if it had such a consequence. And if the analysis turned out to be correct after all, then we should immediately define a new concept of knowledge and reject the old notion as a useless confusion and try to forget it.

None of this shows that my particular analysis of knowledge is correct, although it suggests that radical skepticism is false. I included 4 to allow for intuitions according to which we do not have knowledge in so called Gettier cases. It has been argued that justified true belief isn't knowledge; for if I hear voices outside my door, I will believe that there is somebody there, and this belief is justified and it may be true too, but it won't count as knowledge if the voices I hear come from a tape recorder, while the people outside my door are silent.

For people whose concept of knowledge is such that I won't know that there is somebody outside my door in this example, I have added clause 4. Suppose that my reasoning occurs in separate steps: First I think "There is a very high probability that I hear voices as if they came from outside my door. Then we might make clause 4 a little more precise by saying that it means that every step and every premise in the reasoning whereby I justify my belief in p should still be valid given full knowledge of the actual case.

This would mean that we would not have to say that I knew that there were somebody outside my door, because one of the step in my justification for that belief namely "If voices almost certainly emanate from outside my door, then there is a very high probability that there is somebody there.

One could go on to elaborate this in more detail, but I don't think that is necessary for my purposes The point is that there is no reason to suppose that a correct analysis of "knowledge" would have to show that it is impossible for us to know that we are rational, even if rationality is defined to be anchored in truth.

Such a connection would no more make knowledge impossible than the obvious connection between knowledge itself and truth "knowing p implies p" need make knowledge impossible. Skeptic : Well, so you say that we can know that we are rational.

We can also know ordinary empirical propositions, although it may always turn out that we were mistaken. So it would make perfect sense to say: "I know the sun will rise tomorrow. Maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow.

Dogmatist : Yes, it sounds peculiar, but that is only because you normally say "The sun will rise tomorrow. I am sure that much more could be said about the nuances of different utterances involving claims to knowledge and possibilities of being mistaken, but I don't think that is essential for my point; which is that skepticism is false.

Skeptic : But why do you assume that there is some "strict sense" of the word "knowledge" over and above what it is commonly used to indicate and convey? Dogmatist : Because I think that it clarifies matters if one separate different aspects of a word, and call one aspect its "force", another its "logistic meaning", a third its "reference" and so forth. But my argument in no way depends upon that being so.

Even if it is a mistake to speculate about language in those terms and concepts, even if we should stick to direct manifestations of use, it still holds true that knowledge of ordinary empirical things is possible!

Your skepticism, indeed, presupposes an analysis of the word "knowing" that deviate from its ostensible use. For if we just look at how that word is used, it is evident that we often use it to ascribe knowledge to people, and these ascriptions are often accepted and there is nothing in the plain speech behavior of speakers that would indicate that knowledge of empirical matters is impossible. Therefore I assume the worst-case scenario for my anti-skepticism and admit a semantic theory that distinguishes the "strict sense" of the word "knowledge" from its superficial appearance in our language behavior.

You can surely not object to that policy! Skeptic : Okay, I accept that, but I still think it strange to say that one can be wrong about what one knows. Dogmatist : One cannot! If S knows that p, then p. He can't be wrong, if he actually knows that p. Skeptic : But you said earlier that it was no contradiction to say: "I know the sun will rise tomorrow. If the sun doesn't rise tomorrow, then I'm wrong in my claim that I know it will rise. So when I say: "Maybe the sun doesn't rise tomorrow", I thereby imply that I may be wrong.

But you just said that I can't be wrong if I actually know that the sun will rise tomorrow. So when I claim that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, I imply that I can't be wrong about that. Hence the above statement both implies that I can be wrong and that I cannot be wrong. So it is a contradiction. Dogmatist : No. It is true that when I say "Maybe the sun doesn't rise tomorrow", I thereby imply that I may be wrong when I say that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow.

It's no contradiction to say: "p, but I may be wrong to believe that p. When I say "I know that p", I am not saying that I can't possibly be wrong about p. Now, this sounds as if it contradicts what I said earlier, that S "can't be wrong about p if he actually knows that p", but the contradiction is unreal. In the present context, the modal operator "can't" operates on ordered pairs consisting of a proposition and a set of evidence. I suspect, however, that in order to get to the root of the confusion, we have distinguish two senses of "knowing".

In one sense of the word, let's call it the "ordinary sense", we commonly know such things as that the sun will rise tomorrow. Knowing, in this sense, does not imply absolute certainty.

Maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow, and in that case I will be wrong now if I say that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. But if the sun indeed rises, then I will presumably be right now to claim that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. But this would be a mistake. I can know now that I now know that the sun will rise tomorrow, for I have sufficient grounds for believing that and, of course, the sun will rise tomorrow.

These sufficient grounds are basically the same as my grounds for my claim that I know that the sun will rise, and these grounds are presumably sufficient for that is what we mean by "sufficient grounds". When I said that "knowing" in the ordinary sense does not imply absolute certainty, what I meant was that there is no rational method that would guarantee that one never made a mistake and still permit one to claim to know at lot of things about everyday matters.

One can know, and one can know that one knows, but sometimes one will mistakenly believe that one knows when, in fact, one doesn't: even if one is perfectly rational all the time. But then there is another sense of "knowing", the sophisticated sense. Knowing, in this sense, implies absolute certainty. A perfectly rational being will never be wrong about p when he claims to have sophisticated knowledge of p.

It is easy to see that one could never rationally claim to have this sort of knowledge about ordinary empirical propositions. Perhaps one can know that one exists and thinks, and perhaps propositions of logic and mathematics are also possible to know in this sense; but one could not thus know that the sun will rise tomorrow. What one can have sophisticated knowledge of, however, is a proposition like "The probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, given my evidence, is p.

I use a fanciful terminology like "box with evidence" to indicate that what goes on here is not a psychological construction; it is just a way of saying something about what "rationality", "probability" etc. To be rational means to assign such and such probabilities to those and those propositions to believe those propositions with such and such levels of confidence.

If I am perfectly rational, I will assign the probability 0. It is possible for me to know that the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is 0. Whereas the contextualist thinks that the same sentence attributing justification can express different propositions depending on the context in which it is produced, the subject-sensitive invariantist thinks that the proposition expressed is invariant, but its truth-value depends on features of the subject which can vary such as how important it is to the subject that the belief in question be true.

For instance, if nothing much hangs, for S , on whether there is orange juice in the house, a faint memory of having seen some in the fridge might be enough for it to be true that S is justified in believing that there is orange juice in the house. On the other hand, if S is diabetic and needs to ingest some sugar quickly, that same faint memory might not be enough for that same proposition to be true.

Notice the difference between Contextualism and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism: the contextualist might say that the same sentence that S is justified in believing that there is orange juice in the house expresses two different propositions one true, the other false depending on whether the conversational context includes the information that S is diabetic and needs to ingest sugar; the subject-sensitive invariantist, on the other hand, holds that the sentence in question always expresses the same proposition, but that very proposition is true in the first case but false in the second.

Nevertheless, the same issue that arose with respect to Contextualism seems to arise here. The Subject-Sensitive Invariantist needs an independent argument to the effect that we can be justified at least to a minimal degree in believing the negations of skeptical hypotheses, for otherwise his trademark claim that propositions attributing us justification for believing such claims are true is itself unjustified.

We turn now to Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Recall that, according to Pyrrhonian Skepticism, suspension of judgment is the only justified attitude with respect to any proposition yes, including the proposition that suspension of judgment is the only justified attitude with respect to any proposition.

We are interested here in whether there are good arguments for such a view. We begin by recalling the tri-partite distinction between belief, disbelief and suspension of judgment. If we identify disbelief in a proposition with belief in its negation, then we are left with two attitudes within the realm of coarse-grained epistemology: belief and suspension of judgment. We assume also that the arguments to follow are addressed to someone who has an interest in, and has considered, the propositions in question.

Otherwise, there is always the possibility of not taking any attitude whatsoever towards a proposition. Such lack of an attitude cannot itself be epistemically justified or not. But if the subject is to take an attitude, then the argument for Pyrrhonian Skepticism has it that suspension of judgment is the only justified one. The Pyrrhonian skeptics sought suspension of judgment as a way of achieving calm ataraxia in the face of seemingly intractable disagreement.

The three modes of Agrippa function together in the following way. The dogmatist will not be able to continue offering different propositions in response to the Pyrrhonian challenge forever—eventually, either no reason will be offered, or a proposition that has already made an appearance will be mentioned again.

The three Pyrrhonian modes, then, work in tandem in order to induce suspension of judgment with respect to any proposition whatsoever. It is at least somewhat misleading to present the Pyrrhonian position in terms of an argument, because when someone presents an argument they are usually committed to the truth of its premises and its conclusion, whereas Pyrrhonian skeptics would suspend judgment with respect to them.

If we do, then it seems that we ourselves should be Pyrrhonian skeptics and if we do become Pyrrhonian skeptics as a result of this argument, we can then start worrying about what to do with respect to the fact that an argument whose premises we believed—and perhaps still believe—to be true convinced us that we are not justified in believing anything. If we do not think that the argument is sound, then we stand to learn something interesting about the structure of an epistemological theory—because each of the premises of the apparently valid argument looks plausible at first sight.

A justified basic belief , by contrast, is a belief that is justified but not in virtue of its relations to other beliefs. Premise 1 is beyond reproach, given our previous definitions. Premise 2 is justified by the mode of hypothesis.

Step 3 of the argument follows from premises 1 and 2. Premise 4 is also beyond reproach—the only remaining possible structure for an inferential chain to have is to contain basic justified beliefs, but there are none of those according to premise 2. Premise 5 is justified by appeal to the mode of infinite regression, and premise 6 is justified by appeal to the mode of circularity.

Premise 7 might seem to be a truism, but we will have to take a closer look at it. In fact, all of premises 2, 5, 6 and 7 have been rejected by different philosophers at one time or another. We examine those responses in what follows. Foundationalists claim that there are basic justified beliefs—beliefs that are justified but not in virtue of their relations to other beliefs.

In fact, according to foundationalism, all justified beliefs are either basic beliefs or are justified at least in part in virtue of being inferentially related to a justified belief or to some justified beliefs.

This is where foundationalism gets its name: the edifice of justified beliefs has its foundation in basic beliefs. But how do foundationalists respond to the mode of hypothesis? If basic beliefs are justified but not by other beliefs, then how are they justified? What else besides beliefs is there that can justify beliefs? To a rough first approximation that glosses over many important philosophical issues, experiences are mental states that, like beliefs, aim to represent the world as it is, and, like beliefs too, can fail in achieving that aim—that is, experiences can misrepresent.

Nevertheless, experiences are not to be identified with beliefs, for it is possible to have an experience as of, e. There are three important questions that any foundationalist has to answer. First, what kinds of beliefs do experiences justify?

Second, how must inferentially acquired beliefs be related to basic beliefs in order for them to be justified? Third, in virtue of what do experiences justify beliefs? With respect to the first question, we can distinguish between traditional foundationalism and moderate foundationalism.

Traditional foundationalists think that basic beliefs are beliefs about experiences, whereas moderate foundationalists think that experience can justify beliefs about the external world. Take, for example, the experience that you typically have when looking at a tomato under good perceptual conditions—an experience that, remember, can be had even if no tomato is actually there.

The traditional foundationalist, on the other hand, would say that the experience justifies you only in believing that you have an experience as of a tomato in front of you. You may well be justified in believing that there is a tomato in front of you, but only inferentially.

A traditional argument in favor of traditional foundationalism relies on the fact that whereas you can be mistaken regarding whether there is a tomato in front of you when you have an experience as of facing a tomato, you cannot, in the same situation, be mistaken regarding whether you are undergoing such an experience. From the point of view of traditional foundationalism, this fact indicates that the moderate foundationalist is taking an unnecessary epistemic risk—the risk of having a foundation composed of false beliefs.

The moderate foundationalist can reply that the traditional foundationalist must undertake a similar risk. And if it were just as difficult to distinguish between the true and the false in the realm of beliefs about our own experiences as it is in the realm of beliefs about the external world, then we could be wrong about which of our own beliefs are basically justified and which are not.

If this kind of meta-fallibilism is accepted, then why not accept the further kind according to which basic justified beliefs can be false? Of course, the resolution of this dispute depends on whether, as the moderate believes, we can be mistaken about our own experiences. What about our second question: how must basic beliefs be related to inferentially justified beliefs?

Here too there are two different kinds of foundationalism: deductivism and non-deductivism. According to the deductivist, the only way in which a possibly one-membered set of basic justified beliefs can justify another belief is by logically entailing that other belief. In other words, there has to be a valid argument at least some of whose premises are basic justified beliefs [ 19 ] and whose conclusion is the inferentially justified belief in question.

Given that the argument is valid, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion—it is impossible for all the premises to be true while the conclusion is false. Non-deductivism allows relations other than logical entailment as possible justificatory relations. For instance, many foundationalists will claim that good inductive inferences from basic justified beliefs provide their conclusions with justification—even though inductive arguments are not valid, that is, even though it is possible for all the premises of a good inductive argument to be true while its conclusion is false.

Although these are independent distinctions, traditional foundationalists tend to be deductivists, whereas moderate foundationalists tend to be non-deductivists. Notice that for a traditional, deductivist foundationalist, there cannot be false justified beliefs.

Many contemporary epistemologists would shy away from this strong form of infallibilism, and take that consequence to be an argument against the conjunction of traditional foundationalism and deductivism. The question that is most interesting from the point of view of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is our third one: what is it about the relation between an experience and a belief that, according to the foundationalist, allows the former to justify the latter?

Analogous questions apply to non-foundationalist positions too, and the discussion to follow is not restricted to the specific case of foundationalism.

There are three different proposals about how to answer this question that are the most prominent. Our third question can then be stated as follows: what makes epistemic principles true? There is no more basic fact in virtue of which epistemic principles obtain. They describe bedrock facts, not to be explained in terms of anything else, but are instead to be used to explain other facts. The other two positions are non-primitivist. Internalist non-primitivism holds that epistemic principles are true in virtue of facts about ourselves—for instance, one prominent internalist view is that which epistemic principles are true for a given subject is determined by which epistemic principles that subject would accept under deep reflection see Foley Both externalists and internalists think that primitivists are overlooking real facts, whereas primitivists think that there are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in non-primitivist philosophy.

Within the non-primitivist camp, externalists think that internalists have too subjective a conception of epistemology—to some extent, thinking it so, or being disposed to think it so under conditions of deep reflection, makes it so for the internalist.

This is due, at least in part, to the fact that infinitism has to deal with what might seem like formidable obstacles. For instance, it seems that no one actually has an infinite number of beliefs. To this objection, the infinitist is likely to reply that actually occurring beliefs are not needed, only implicit beliefs that are available to the subject in order to continue constructing his inferential chain if called upon to do so by others or by himself. A second apparently formidable problem for infinitism has to do with the fact that the mere appeal to a new belief, regardless of its epistemic status, cannot provide justification to the belief we started out with.

In other words, infinitism seems to run afoul of the following principle:. The infinitist might reply that he does not run afoul of that principle, because the beliefs adduced in support of the initial beliefs are themselves justified by beliefs further down the chain. But what goes for the initial set of beliefs goes, it seems, for longer chains. If the appeal to a single unjustified belief cannot do any justificatory work of its own, why would appealing to a large number of unjustified beliefs do any better?

Even leaving that problem aside, the infinitist, like the coherentist, maintains that justification can arise merely in virtue of relations among beliefs. Infinitists will then have to respond to many of the same objections that are leveled against coherentism—in particular, they would have to respond to the isolation objection mentioned in the next section.

The second feature is the idea that the unit of justification is the individual belief. Putting these two rejections together, the coherentist believes that justification is a symmetrical and holistic matter. It is not individual beliefs that are justified in the primary sense of the word, but only complete systems of beliefs—individual beliefs are justified, when they are, in virtue of belonging to a justified system of beliefs.

The central coherentist notion of justification is best taken to be a comparative one: a system of beliefs B1 is better justified than a system of beliefs B2 if and only if B1 has a greater degree of internal coherence than B2. One crucial question that coherentists have to answer, of course, is what it takes for one system of beliefs to have a greater degree of coherence than another. The objection centers on the fact that, according to the coherentist, the justification of a system of beliefs is entirely a matter of relations among the beliefs constituting the system.

But this runs against the strong intuition that experience has a very important role to play in the justification of beliefs. Suppose now that we switch systems of beliefs—somehow, you come to have my set of beliefs and I come to have yours.

Given that coherence is entirely a matter of relations among beliefs, your system will be as coherent in my mind as it was in yours, and vice-versa. And yet, our beliefs are now completely unjustified—there you are, reading, believing that you are swimming, and here I am, swimming, believing that I am reading. In other words, certain transformations that preserve coherence in a system of beliefs do not seem to preserve justification.

In reply, coherentists have argued that it is possible to give experience a role without sacrificing the idea that coherence is entirely a matter of relations among beliefs—one idea is to require that any minimally acceptable system of beliefs contain beliefs about the experiences that the subject is undergoing see BonJour and Lehrer It is fair to say that there is no agreement regarding whether this move can solve the problem.

But, whereas the foundationalist thinks that the starting points of inferential chains are beliefs that are justified by something other than beliefs, the positist thinks that the starting points of inferential chains are beliefs that are not justified by anything—they are posits that we have to believe without justification. Despite this difference between the positist and the foundationalist, the positions are structurally similar enough that analogues of the questions posed to the foundationalist can be asked of the positist.